Learning Center

reading

Practice Reader Questioning with The Mysteries of Harris Burdick

december 16, 2009

The Mysteries of Harris Burdick consists of fourteen black-and-white drawings, each accompanied by a title and a caption, allowing readers to make up their own stories to complement the pictures. It’s written by the award-winning author/illustrator Chris Van Allsburg, also known for The Polar Express.

This fabulous book is a valuable resource for targeting the questioning strategy in reading comprehension. To practice questioning strategies for comprehension, teachers could have kids look at the illustration, read the line of text, and then develop their own questions. What do they wonder, what do they want to know, what do they predict? Bottom line, this is is a terrific tool for getting kids to just practice sincere reader questioning.